# RPG A DAY 2025: Day 21 - Unexpected tags: #thoughts #thoughts/RPGaDay/2025 ![[RPG a Day 2025 (illo).png]] Game designers don't talk about the role of the unexpected in their mechanics enough. In part, that's because a lot of game designers don't know that there are other ways that randomness and novelty can be introduced to the game flow beyond the one game that they know how to play. This is one of those reasons that I encourage people who want to write their own system or write things for an extant system to be familiar with multiple mechanical architectures. Knowing how things are done elsewhere can give you ideas on different ways to approach what you already know. This leads to more interest in what you can create, including cultivating the perverse urge to do something that someone else hasn't done. The more you see what people have already done, the more you will know where to look for those fruitful voids. There are effectively three places that you can inject randomness into a resolution mechanic for a tabletop wargame or RPG. A few moments' consideration will point out the obvious, but sometimes it's worth running down what the obvious is. They shake out to fortune at the front, fortune in the middle, and fortune at the end. We'll also talk about things that don't involve fortune at all before we're done. ## Fortune at the Front There are a handful of war games and only a few RPGs that involve [fortune at the front](https://rpgmuseum.fandom.com/wiki/Fortune_at_the_beginning). What do I mean when I talk about fortune at the front? It's fairly obvious. The typical sequence of enacting an action within the context of the game involves coming up with an idea of what you want to do, doing what you want to do within the context of the narrative, and explaining what the results are of having done that thing. Fortune at the front moves the injected randomness to the beginning of the first phase of that operation, using whatever determination that you use. The random assertion occurs, and then you determine what to do, execute your effort and then you explain how that effort affects your position in the narrative. You can see why there aren't a whole lot of systems that use fortune at the front. It generally involves determining the forces at play before you have nailed down what you want to do in reaction to them. Games in which you roll dice and then allocate those dice to determine your action are fortune at the front, which means that **[[Bliss Stage]]** actually fits into this categorization. Having been put into a situation, you roll your dice (in this case, Fudge dice) and then allocate those results to influence the situation based on what you want to accomplish. Narration follows, interpreting that allocation. This is obviously quite rare in terms of design mechanically. It usually comes down to being a resource allocation mechanism. Those resources may be randomly generated from dice or cards, or they may literally be static resources like the stones used in the **[Marvel Universe RPG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Universe_Roleplaying_Game)**.[^1] It's an underutilized mechanism, in my opinion, and it is something that might be worth experimenting with as a modifier to mainstream designs. Consider this: take your typical **D&D** game loop. Instead of rolling a d20 after you decide what you want to do, roll it at the very start of your turn. Would that change how you decide what you're going to do, knowing before you do it that it's either going to be a critical success, a success, a failure, or a critical failure? How would that change how you think about what you're going to do? Give it a try one night as a one-off. ## Fortune in the Middle You are likely far more familiar with [fortune in the middle](http://indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=442.0),[^2] since that is pretty much how every modern RPG deals with things. You decide what you want to do, you roll the dice to see how well you do it, you may call upon other mechanics to modify the result of the source of randomness, and then you interpret the results into the shared fiction of the game. You've seen this 10,000 times, and you know it by heart. In fact, this is how you expect every game to run. The important thing to note is that the randomness is injected into the middle of determining results, which means that the player has some further ability to affect the outcome. If the randomness source is the final word on what happens and all that's left is to interpret it within the fiction, then it's much more fortune at the end. If you can affect the result by spending hero points, burning some resource, or forcing a reroll, then it's fortune in the middle. There's a really good reason that this is the default state of affairs in most game design, and that's because it works. It has a clear line of delineation from player intent through asking the oracle, as it were, whether or not the attempt is successful, letting the player affect the result if they can, and then proceeding to interpretation. It's very intuitive, and it fits the structure of RPG play as conversation, which indie gaming has stated as an axiom but which everyone largely understood to be the way we play well before that. There's no point in giving examples because I'm certain that you have a dozen off the top of your head. If you are a game designer, this is probably the way you've envisioned your game being played. I want to be clear, this does not require the source of randomness to be dice by any measure. Any kind of unpredictable mechanism can be used here. Cards are extremely popular for an alternative, as you see in games like **[[Eternal Contenders]]**. Resource allocation can be a mechanism for injecting the unexpected into the flow of play. An aggressive bidding mechanism from people at the table works just as well. For an example of that, see **[[The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen]]**,[^3] which uses increasing bids beautifully to ratchet a certain amount of tension. ## Fortune at the End Here is where we get into a bit of controversy because there are significant segments of the RPG punditry who believe that the classic resolution mechanic is actually [fortune at the end](https://rpgmuseum.fandom.com/wiki/Fortune_at_the_end) rather than fortune in the middle.[^4] I disagree. The reason that I do so, I actually already told you: If the player can still affect the outcome once the dice have been rolled, then the fortune is in the middle of the action that they are taking. There are very few games anymore which have no form of hero points, story points, stress points, or some other mechanism by which the player can reject or modify the outcome of a given roll. Yes, there are some movements who believe that allowing players to have further input once the randomness has been injected is anathema, heretical. *"The dice must fall where they may,"* they say. When they insist upon that, yes, you have a fortune at the end mechanic. At this point, such design decisions are intentionally retro, which is an interesting thing to note as a point of departure from discussions which happened more than two decades ago. The world has changed. I've carefully positioned something a little surprising in this discussion. I have consistently put *"interpreting the outcome"* as the last step, no matter what, because that is what we do. The dice do not speak to specifics, no matter what the die mechanism is. The dice can't speak to specifics. They have no understanding of the fiction or of the position of characters within it. They can only determine an outcome. Interpreting that outcome is something only a human being can do, at least at this point.[^5] There is a fine example of a game in which interpretation does not follow the injection of randomness: in **[[Wushu]]**, one decides what you're going to do and states overtly what it is your character is doing, and the core assumption is that you have stated exactly what the fiction is. Whatever you said is what happens. Only *then* are the dice rolled based on the number of details that you've invoked, and from the dice results, the effect of what you have spoken into being is determined. This is a strange enough situation compared to the game loop of most play that it bears a little more discussion. Let's say that you are a beat cop in Hong Kong, and you find yourself getting jumped in an alley by a group of Tong. They would like to beat the hell out of you. You would prefer *not* to have the hell beat out of you. Gameplay ensues. In **Wushu**, you would then proceed to describe exactly what you do. *"I pull out my gun and take a tight triangle stance as the first guy comes at me and put a round straight in his throat. Then I dive behind the garbage bin as his buddies pull out their pistols with a look of meth-addled glee and begin pouring rounds into the garbage bin behind which I'm crouching."* There are five details here: - Pulling out a gun and taking a triangle stance. - Shooting the guy in the throat as he comes at you. - Diving behind the garbage bin. - The look of meth-addled glee. - Them pouring rounds into the garbage bin behind which you're crouching. In **Wushu**, that would mean that you get 5d6 (the number of narrative details) to allocate between attack and defense, and then roll. What you've described is exactly what happens—not just for you, but what they do. Let's say you throw 2d6 in defense and 3d6 in attack. You have Kung Fu Cop as a Trait with a value of 4. So you roll all of those, and anything under 4 is considered a success. You need at least one success in defense because they're just a bunch of mooks, and whatever you have in terms of successes on the attack decreases their threat rating. They go away when the threat rating hits zero. Once the dice are rolled, there's nothing else that you can do because there's nothing to interpret. The fiction has been set. Next, the GM will probably narrate them doing something to make your life more difficult, accruing some dice, and proceeding in the same way—or they may not, considering that it's a group of mooks. The randomness is injected at the end, and it has the final say on what the effect of what you've done is on the fiction. ## A Lack of Fortune This may bring up an unusual question. How can you have a role-playing game or war game which doesn't involve fortune at all? How can you play in the absence of a randomizer introducing an inability to completely predict outcomes? Just because there is no randomness injection doesn't mean that you can always predict the outcome. Note that games which involve a bidding mechanism like **[Amber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Diceless_Roleplaying_Game)** aren't truly without fortune. The bids between players for successes represent a source of randomness. You can't predict the outcome of that. Just being diceless (or without cards or other randomizer) does not represent a lack of fortune. What does, then? Let's consider the interesting case of **[[Microscope]]**, which some people probably don't consider a roleplaying game. In **Microscope**, you are not assigned a character at the beginning. In fact, you technically don't have a character at any point. Instead, you take up a character at the beginning of a scene, which is established by asking a question, and that character does not belong to you. It may not have even existed before that moment. The character has no stats. There is no randomness. What is said happens. Now, this isn't entirely true, because if there is a disagreement about what happens, then first, negotiation occurs, which involves no randomness at all. But if negotiations break down and no resolution can be achieved, thus, then a vote of players at the table is taken, and majority rules. A vote can be seen to be an injection of randomness, but it is not the normal gameplay loop. Instead, it exists to handle an edge case. No randomness is injected. So where does the uncertainty come from? It comes from the most uncertain place of all, trying to figure out what someone else at the table is going to do next. You don't need a source of external randomness mechanically injected for there to be uncertainty. That is ultimately what we want and why we want it. The frisson of surprise is a huge motivator in almost every game that human beings play. Think about the games that you've been playing and the ones that you want to play. Where is the uncertainty coming from? Where is the unpredictability coming from? Is it something that you've done a thousand times? Maybe it's time to try something different. Try something new. There are surprising numbers of games that do things differently than you're used to. Give one a go. See how it fits. You might find that you have a new favorite game. [^1]: Pointedly, not the one that uses dice, nor [the more current one that uses d616](https://www.marvel.com/rpg), but the one that uses stone allocation. I have a set on my shelf, but it's never been published in PDF as far as I can determine. If you or someone you know can get your hands on PDFs of this particular version of the Marvel Universe RPG, let me know, because I would love to have them for my collection. [^2]: You have to take Ron Edwards' pontificating here with a certain grain of salt in the modern era. More than 20 years on, things have come a long way. Not least in response to what he wrote right here. Still, an excellent point of reference. [^3]: Truthfully, one of my favorite games of all time. One which is extremely simple to play at any table, and only requires people with quick wits, improv skills of surprising depth, and a certain flair for old forms of storytelling much lost today. If I could find a regular group to play **Baron Munchausen** with, I would be a disgustingly happy man. Some things are not meant to be. [^4]: This is, and will certainly not be the last time that I differ from quite a lot of the punditry. You may have picked up that I don't mind blazing my own trail. [^5]: Large language models are making significant inroads in taking care of this little problem, to quite a lot of disquiet in a fair chunk of the gaming public. I remain neutral on the subject. I don't mind AI doing useful things, as long as it's not intrusive on the game loop, and no one has decided on what a good game loop is that integrates it. But that's a topic for another day.